Electronic mail, commonly referred to as “email”, has become an invaluable source of communication in the modem world. Email generally refers to an electronic version of a letter that is communicated from the sender's computer to one or more recipients' computers, possibly via multiple intermediary computers or computing devices. Email has numerous advantages—it allows communications to occur much more quickly than the traditional postal service, while at the same time allowing for the creation of a record of communications between sender and recipient.
Email, however, is not without its problems. One such problem is that users often like to carry out discussions via email. These discussions start, for example, with one email message sent to a group of recipients. One of the recipients responds to the email message with some comments, and sends the response to all of the recipients (and the original sender). Again, another recipient may respond to these new comments with some additional comments, and send this response to all of the other recipients (including the original sender and the sender of the first comments). Typical email systems forward messages by optionally including the text of the original message(s), as well as a list of all the recipients, subject, date and time, etc. This can result in many different email messages being sent to each individual participating in the discussion, and can result in long threads of messages that often include redundant information.
One possible solution to this problem is to store electronic mail content for a collaborative discussion on a centralized storage server (e.g., a web server or SQL server) and simply pass around a pointer to that storage in the electronic mail message. When a participant replies to the electronic mail the storage is updated and notification may be sent to the participants, which in turn can examine the latest status of the collaborative discussion by de-referencing the pointer to the storage sent around in the notification (or the original electronic mail). This can considerably simplify the ability to track discussions and facilitate collaborative decision making while at the same time avoiding electronic mail clutter.
However, there are problems with this approach. Without appropriate innovation, there are client-side user interface (UI) and interpretation issues, and server-side problems. One problem is that these web documents are hosted at a single location, providing a centralized model for distribution of the web documents. This is contrary to typical electronic mail systems which follow a distributed model in which copies of electronic mail messages are stored in multiple distributed locations (based on the individual recipients and authors of the messages). Being based on a centralized model, such electronic communications are not well-integrated into the users' distributed email systems. Many inconsistencies and duplications can arise due to this poor integration. For example, controls that users are accustomed to having displayed on the toolbars or menus of their email programs are duplicated (although possibly with different functionality) within the web document. Such duplications and inconsistencies result in a rather user-unfriendly interface that can be confusing and non-intuitive.
The invention described below addresses these disadvantages, integrating collaborative messaging into an electronic mail system.